Our project is based on the idea that the combination of the sponge's filtration power and the bacteria engineered biosensing capacities will form a bioremediation agent that will be more efficient that if we just released the bacteria into the water. However we believed it was important to also take into consideration the ethical issues such a system would rise, since it would imply the use of an animal as a biosensing tool, and the introduction of a genetically modified bacteria in its microbiome.

The organisms commonly suggested as bioremediation agents are micro-organisms and plants. But the sponge is an animal, even though for a long time it was thought to be a "zoophyte", an organism at the limit between vegetal and animal. And what is often considered acceptable for micro-organisms and plants concerning genetically engineering, raises a lot more questions and debates when we want to apply them on animals.
In our case, we saw two major issues with the Sponge Patrol project:

1. even though we are not modifying the sponge's genome, we are modifying its microbiome and replacing with a synthetic one, which could be considered in some extent as a modification of the sponge.
2. the use of the Sponge Patrol system would imply that we put living sponges in waters that were likely to be polluted, and thus we would knowingly endanger the sponge's health.

We soon realized that little to no paper, conferences or legislations had ever talked about the use of an animal as a host for a genetically modified micro-organism (GMMO) to serve as a bioremediation agent, nor discussed the ethical issues such a use would raise. The focus seemed to be largely on modified micro-organisms and plants, with sometimes the mention of a GMMO intended to be symbiotic with a natural plant. We hence decided to discuss the status of such an organism between ourselves, hoping that our reflexion would bring to light the existence of such organisms, and the importance to take them into consideration in legal and ethical discussions concerning GMO. We organized a debate where we tried to address as best we could several questions that seemed important to us.

1. Is modifying an organism's microbiome the same as modifying the organism itself?

We all agreed that in the device we wanted to build, the sponge itself would not be genetically modified. We are only changing the genome of the bacteria, so the sponge would not be a GMO.
However some of us thought that changing its microbiome was still in some extent a modification of the sponge, though not a genetic one ; but they had difficulties in finding exactly why the new sponge would be different.

One of the persistent ideas was that most of cells that constitute a sponge were probably bacteria and not sponge's cells, just like the human body contains ten times more bacteria than human cells. Hence if we were to change an considerable part of the sponge's microbiome with synthetics bacteria, then the new sponge would be mostly made of genetically engineered cells.
Other team members, though, argued that the nature of an organism was not determined by the cells that are the most numerous in its body ; they made a clear distinction between the sponge's eukaryotic cells (pinacocytes, choanocytes, etc.) and the prokaryotic cells living in its microbiome (bacterias). Only a change in the eukaryotic cells containing the sponge's DNA would actually be a modification of the sponge itself.

Another observation was that by bringing engineered cells into the sponge's microbiome, we were giving the sponge a function that it didn't possess before: the ability to serve as a biosensor for toxic pollutants. Once again though, several members of the team argued that only the bacteria could be considered biosensors, and not the sponge which, in the device, would only pump water. The pumping would bring large amount of water to the bacteria who would then be able to detect the presence of pollutants, but the sponge itself didn't sense any compounds, so it would not be true to say that it has a new function.

We finally agreed to say that an organism hosting GMMO should be given a special status, as:

1. they are different from GMO in the sense that no change has been made in their DNA
2. they are different from natural organisms in the sense that their behavior of health could be affected by the engineered bacteria
3. they are different from natural organisms in the sense that releasing them out of the lab would have the same effects as releasing GMO in the environment.

We believe that such organisms, which we tentatively called Organism with Genetically Engineered Microbiome (OGEM), should be taken into consideration in legal and ethical discussions, separately from GMO and from natural organisms.